Wake Up Little Susie - Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v Wade (Hardcover, New)

In a thorough and important, if often tiresomely repetitive, study, Solinger (Women's Studies/Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) dissects the politics of female fertility in America from 1945-65, when the strikingly different treatments of middle-class white and poor black pregnant teenagers clearly reflected the demands of a racist, family-centered economy. Before WW II, Solinger reports, unwed mothers in the US were considered the products of defective, amoral environments - permanent outcasts for whom no kind of rehabilitation was possible. After the war, she argues, a perceived societal need to produce as many white children in "healthy" male-headed families as possible, combined with new Freudian psychological theories and racist sociological assumptions concerning black sexuality, engendered a dualistic treatment of unwed pregnant women depending on the color of their skin. Whereas the "market value" of white babies enabled and even encouraged white single mothers to "sacrifice" their offspring for adoption in exchange for a second chance at respectability (usually after exile in a maternity home), "unmarketable" illegitimate black babies were considered the inevitable product of the "natural" black libido and were therefore left to be raised by their mothers, who were in turn treated as incorrigible breeders who gave birth to win more government benefits. With the "sexual revolution" (for whites) and "population bomb" (for blacks) of the late 60's and early 70's came the technological fixes of birth control and legalized abortion - though these steps toward female self-determination for women of all races were more a result, Solinger claims, of a slump in the white baby market and fear of black overpopulation than of societal concern for the fate of single mothers. Revelatory but regrettably dry work with repercussions for today. (Kirkus Reviews)

Rickie Solinger provides the first published analyses of maternity home programs for unwed mothers from 1945 to 1965, and examines how nascent cultural and political constructs such as the "population bomb" and the "sexual revolution" reinforced racially-specific public policy initiatives. Such initiatives encouraged white women to relinquish their babies, spawning a flourishing adoption market, while they subjected black women to social welfare policies which assumed they would keep their babies and aimed to prevent them from having more.

General

Imprint:	Routledge
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	February 1992
First published:	1992
Authors:	Rickie Solinger
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 26mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	336
Edition:	New
ISBN-13:	978-0-415-90448-3
Categories:	Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies > Multicultural studies > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Family & relationships > General
LSN:	0-415-90448-X
Barcode:	9780415904483

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